Cloudflare One improves SaaS security
Cloud software security company Cloudflare has announced that it’s acquired fellow security vendor Vectrix for an undisclosed sum. The move bolsters Cloudflare One, the company’s Secure Access System Edge (SASE) security platform, with additional Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) functionality. CASB makes end-user use of cloud services visible to corporate IT and provides policy management.
“Vectrix enhances Cloudflare’s existing Zero Trust platform, Cloudflare One, by allowing security teams to scan third-party tools–including Google Workspace, GitHub, and AWS–to detect and mitigate issues such as inappropriate file sharing and user permission misconfigurations,” said the companies in a statement.
Enterprises are globally investing billions annually in IT infrastructure and services, as they migrate IT workloads and business processes to the cloud. Businesses are simultaneously grappling with new challenges presented by hybrid work schedules. Cloudflare One and Vectrix help to keep those varied channels secure, according to Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s co-founder and CEO.
“Cloudflare’s global network blocks attempts to compromise data at multiple levels while accelerating traffic to the Internet. We’re excited to welcome the Vectrix team to Cloudflare to help deliver the fastest, most secure, and robust Zero Trust platform for the enterprise.”
Securing SaaS use
Cloudflare noted the strong growth of Software as a Service (SaaS) and other public cloud service spending, amidst the changing and increasing challenges to corporate IT.
“With Vectrix, IT and security teams can perform security scans across their third-party tools to better detect and mitigate issues ranging from unauthorized user access and file exposure to misconfigurations and shadow IT,” said Cloudflare.
In a separate blog post noting the acquisition, Cloudflare said that adding CASB to Cloudflare One was obvious. But it decided to acquire Vectrix instead of rolling a solution of its own.
“Vectrix became the best option after evaluating them against the priorities we have for this group of products,” it said.
Cloudflare explained how the technology works: “Vectrix scans the SaaS applications that your team uses to detect anomalies in configuration, permissions, and sharing. Each SaaS application is different – the risks vary from a Google Sheet that is made public to leaked secrets in GitHub – and Vectrix gives customers a single place to control and audit those types of events,” said Cloudflare.
Cloudflare said that Vectrix’s functionality will be integrated into the core Cloudflare One product, instead of added as a point solution.
